I linked up with the Dabbling Speechie to share a Funny SLP story from my career!

I think most SLP's would say that you either have one of those days when you are laughing the whole day or you have one of those days that you just want to pull your hair out. It is those days of laughter that help us make it through. I love thinking about all the "kid-isms" that have occurred throughout my career. Luckily I feel that I have had more of those days then the hair pulling out ones but either way I just love being an SLP!

Thing 1 and Thing 2

It was easy to think of the story that I wanted to share as I still think of it every time I work with a set of twins. It was about 6 years into my career. I was working in an outpatient hospital clinic and had a set of twins that I was seeing for individual therapy sessions back to back. These twins were so cute. They always came in dressed EXACTLY the same, same dress, wearing the same colors, hair fixed the same way, however, the one thing different about them was that they wore necklaces that had their individual name on them. This was the only thing that I could use to tell them apart and although parents of twins have an incredible ability to be able to tell their own twins apart, this particular mom mentioned often that the necklaces helped her as well.

These twins had various articulation difficulties as well as some expressive language difficulties but that didn't mean that they weren't very SMART and very SNEAKY!

This particular day I went out to get the first twin and as always I took a peek at her necklace to make sure I had the right one as well as called out her name. She ran up and was ready to go. Both her mom and sister said "bye" using her name which also reassured me that I had the right one. We started therapy and about 10 minutes in I began noticing just some slight character differences that I thought were odd but ignored it at first. Then there was the one word that this particular twin had been working so hard on mastering, her own name, but she wasn't saying it as well as she had been or didn't seem as motivated to be working on this so I thought well maybe I will just check in with mom and make sure that I had the correct twin. Mom looked at the necklaces and asked her her name to which she replied correctly and then mom said "nope, you have the right one" and we returned to therapy. After our hour was up I went to get the second twin. As we walked back to therapy I just couldn't shake the feeling that this wasn't the right twin. Their mannerisms were giving them away.

When we got back to the room I started "accidentally" calling her by the wrong name and she was doing a really good job keeping up with me and reassuring me that she was the twin she was pretending to be but eventually she messed up and started laughing and said "You are smart, teacher Jenn, not even my mom catches on". Needless to say I headed back out to talk to mom and the girls explained that they had switched necklaces and just thought it would be funny to play a trick on me.

Mom was so embarrassed. When they returned the next week mom said "Don't worry, I got them tattooed with their name so we don't make the same mistake again". Even though I knew that she wouldn't do that, my mouth dropped in surprise, to which she replied " Oh come on, Jenn, of course I wouldn't do that". We couldn't help but laugh at all the non-sense. It still makes for a great story.

I hope you enjoyed my funny SLP story. It's always fun to have a few funny stories to keep in the SLP memory bank.

Be sure to head on over to The Dabbling Speechie to check out more Funny SLP stories!!